We speak with
Dr. Wendy Coates, Professor Emerita at UCLA and a
pioneer in emergency medicine education. She speaks about what it was like
being one of the only women in emergency medicine earlier in her career, and
why mentorship has been the most rewarding aspect of her career.

M Lin: Please tell us where
you are right now in your career.

W Coates: Right now, I am a very
proud member of AWAEM, and just so thrilled to see how it’s taken off over the
last 10 years. I’m at Harbor UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. My
title there is that I’m a senior faculty and education specialist. I’ve
dedicated my whole career to training the next generation of emergency medicine
educators, and education scholars. I have a chance to focus on that, and try to
advance new talent in scholarship in education.

M Lin: That’s so wonderful
and important. When did you first get involved with AWAEM?

W Coates: Well, I think I first got
involved in AWAEM before AWAEM existed because there was nothing like this, and
as maybe some of your members have already said on their interviews, [that]
they found AWAEM to be a great place to meet other people and to gain
mentorship. There were many, many years where many of us felt isolated, and
needed a place just like this, and there was really no place to turn unless you
just knew people. We basically knew each other, and we formed our own little
groups, but of course that didn’t really address the greater, much broader
needs of all women in emergency medicine. We were just so excited to learn that
AWAEM would be supported, and are thrilled with how it’s really developed into
what it is today.

M Lin: Tell me more about
how AWAEM has changed over its 10-year period.

W Coates: Well, I think in the very
beginning, a lot of visionaries in the leadership of SAEM recognized that women
needed different kinds of support because there was a lack of mentorship for
women in academic medicine in general, not just emergency medicine. As a
specialty, emergency medicine, [which] has AWAEM, has been a leader in
developing things that its members need. SAEM had a great vision, and I think
it was Bob Hockberger, who was instrumental in helping AWAEM get off the
ground. I can say that from my institution’s perspective, he was a very
supportive chair to have as a woman. It’s no surprise to me that he was one of
the ones who was involved in getting this off the ground.

For my career, I would say that
AWAEM has been weighed more heavily on me being a mentor for people who are
coming up behind me, but as we all know, there’s so many different kinds of
mentorship. The most common one is people who are younger or more junior than
you. I have been so impressed and pleased to be part of the career development
of so many younger and more junior [doctors] over many, many years. Also, this
is an amazing group of peers, and people who are pioneers in the specialty, and
people who are accomplished across many, many different areas of emergency
medicine. To just be right in the mix with all those people who are willing to
just sit down, and talk, and give you advice without any expectation of
something in return is a wonderful thing.

M Lin: Definitely. You mentioned
earlier this unmet need that AWAEM is filling. Can you compare and contrast
that potentially to other women-focused organizations?

W Coates: Well, I’m not really an
active member of other women-focused organizations at this point. I’ve mainly
dedicated my efforts toward AWAEM, and follow a lot of the other organizations,
such as FemInEM, and organizations that are really making progress. I think
it’s the same idea. It’s women who are talking up other women, and just making
things so good for each other, and celebrating each other’s accomplishments,
and finding opportunities for mentorship and sponsorship when something comes
your way, and you can’t do it or you have something that comes your way, and
you think a junior person would really benefit from it. I think these are great
forms to get partnerships together, and mentorship dyads, and groups together
to accomplish great things.

M Lin: Can you describe any
potential mentorship or sponsorship relationships you’ve developed in AWAEM that
you may not otherwise have encountered?

W Coates: It’s really hard to
separate AWAEM from just the fantastic friends that I’ve made through AWAEM.
It’s almost impossible to draw the line. Well, did it start with AWAEM and now
we go out every time we ever go to a national meeting together because now
we’re just great friends or is it vice versa? I would say that that’s really
one of the greatest benefits too is that there’s all these dynamic women who
are leaders in such different areas within emergency medicine. You know what?
We’re all just friends because we have so many more things in common. It gives
us a broader view of our specialty, and just being able to sit down with
somebody who invented the such-and-such, whatever that might be. You share the
same issues of work-life balance. It’s nice to just realize that you’re not
alone.

M Lin: How do you anticipate
the professional needs of women in academic emergency medicine will change in
the next 10 years?

W Coates: I’m hopeful that the work
that the people of my generation have done, which has I think led to the
ability of women of the up-and-coming generation, to really be out on a
platform that most people listen to, will even grow more. So that we don’t need
to have something that says, “Oh, well, women need to have a boost.”
That we will just be perceived by all people as equal. We will be able to make
the same progress in our academic lives, and in our personal, and other
professional lives because we’re a person who is doing the best job, and we’re
not the woman who comes in to do this job, and we’re not hired because we’re a
woman. We’re hired because we’re the best. We’re chosen because we’re the best.
That’s my hope for the future is that the differentiation is just erased.

M Lin: Yeah, I mean, I
certainly hope so. Can you comment on how perhaps leadership roles in
women-focused professional organizations might be considered for the purposes
of academic advancement, for example promotion?

W Coates: Oh, of course. It’s difficult.
Everyone has heard of the glass ceiling, and that does exist. I think we all
feel it to different degrees, but it’s a moving target that you’re not really
able to put a finger on exactly how that really impacts any individual person.
If you are working with an organization like AWAEM, and just looking at the
people who are in leadership roles now, okay, these people are more junior than
many leaders in very big specialty organizations. The work that comes out of
AWAEM today, academically, with committees, with just productivity in general
is, I think, it’s incredible. These women have had the opportunity to be given
just the chance to show how accomplished they are. They know that they can just
look to their right or left, and there’s someone there to support them, and
they know where to send them. These are opportunities I don’t think would be
available in the general pool of organizations.

M Lin: Can you describe how
gender has affected your career development?

W Coates: Well, there’s a long pause
here because I always start out by saying that when I went on residency interviews,
in general, I was the only female who would be on any interview day. Then we
would go on a tour of the hospital, and back then, frequently there would be a
tour of, let’s say, the OR suite because you had a surgery rotation. They would
lead the tour group to the doctors locker room to change into scrubs. Then they
would look at me and say, “Well, I think the nurses’ locker room is over
there. We don’t really know, but we’ll just see you later.” Then they
would go. I think that from the very beginning, that was a very visible place.

The other
thing is related to family because our culture decides that maybe women have
more responsibilities than men in the traditional family for taking care of the
house and other things that maybe some people around you think that you’re not
as serious about your career. When in fact, you are just as serious, and many
times more serious about your career than anyone around you. I would say that
those are two discrete examples of just how being a woman is different than
maybe just growing up being a man, and falling right in.

Oh, I do
have one other one. On every single medical school rotation, it took about the
first week or two to prove that I was at least equal to the men. The men walk
into the rotation. They’re just assumed to be at some basic level of knowledge.
It would really be about two weeks before the women on the team could be
granted that level of baseline knowledge. Well, and then, it was inevitable
that we just proved that we were just the best. We supported each other back
then too. I think that there was sort of a back door, “Hey, when you get
there, this is what you should do. This is how you can do it.”

Then to just
jump forward to AWAEM, now you guys have something like that that’s available and
that’s fantastic.

M Lin: What career
accomplishment or accomplishments would you say that you’re most proud of?

W Coates: Oh, that’s super easy. I am
the most proud of the accomplishments of my proteges. That goes from medical
students to residents to fellows, junior faculty, and my colleagues in my
specialty. I feel like these people are so brilliant. I mean, I just feel so
energized when I see one of them have some award or they are accomplished, and
they’re published, and all of these things. That’s just so fantastic.

M Lin: What advice might you
give a younger version of yourself or an AWAEM member at an earlier stage in
her career?

W Coates: The first thing that I
would say is to believe in yourself, and that if you think that you’re right
about something, you probably are. Don’t be afraid to sit at any table and have
a voice. When you have an opinion, then you should voice your opinion. You
should not be militant about it because that just draws criticism, but you
should be calm, and knowledgeable, and be able to back up what you say with
actual knowledge. Very, very importantly, you should find a team of mentors and
trusted colleagues, both men and women, that you can go to for different pieces
of advice, and people who can just travel the course with you as your buddies.
I’m including men and women in that because it’s really important that we do
this all together if we want to reach our eventual goal.

M Lin: Can you name three
other AWAEM members we should consider interviewing? One who is approximately
at your career stage, one who is more junior, and, well, this one says,
“One who is more senior.” And I don’t know how many AWAEM members are
more accomplished than you are, but if you can think of one, we’d love to hear.

W Coates: Okay. Well, first of all,
there’s a ton of people who are accomplished. All right, well, one of my
all-time mentors for my life is Gloria Kuhn, and I think that no interview
would be complete without talking to Gloria about all of this. She would be the
person who is just a little bit before me that I would name. One of my just
about exact age mates would be maybe Mary Jo Wagner. Just to highlight, okay,
about the fact that this isn’t all about work. Mary Jo and I escaped from a
whole fleet of scorpions when we, let’s say, visited one of the Scottsdale
hotel pools after it closed during an SAEM meeting. Scorpions attacked us, and
we ran through the lobby in our bathing suits. We were really, pretty much too
old to do that. It’s not all about everything being official. Then I would say
another member would be Jamie Jordan. She is one of my fellowship graduates,
and is highly accomplished in her career right now, and publishes things, and
is the most organized person I know, and one of the nicest people ever. She
would be a great person to choose as well.

M Lin: Those sound like
great recommendations. Anything else I haven’t asked about AWAEM or about
yourself that you’d like to share?

W Coates: I think that you’ve done a
fantastic job of hitting highlights. I’m sure I’ll think of something as soon
as I walk out the door.

M Lin: That’s how it always
happens, right?

W Coates: It does. I really commend
you for keeping this ship on course, and having such great leadership of the
organization, and I just feel so lucky to be part of it, and to have all of
these great people surrounding me.

Leave a Reply

FemInEM Sign Up

Sign up to get the monthly digest, access to any events or promotions or just to help us grow our voice!

Let us know who you are!

Thanks for signing up!

We can't connect with FemInEMs that don't connect with us. Sign up to get the monthly digest, access to any events or promotions or just to help us grow our voice!

Email Address

First Name

Last Name

By submitting this form, you are granting http://www.feminem.org permission to email you. You may unsubscribe via the link found at the bottom of every email. (See our Email Privacy Policy for details.) Emails are serviced by Constant Contact.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here:
Cookie Policy